[4.10 - 4.11 ] Systems Team Forecast
Xypherous continued the communication train with the Systems Team Forecast for patch 4.10 and 4.11 where he honed in on several itemization changes that are coming down the pipeline:
"Note: As this is a forecast, this won't have many specifics in it. I'll have my usual style of post with the specifics of item changes on Friday when we try to coordinate a PBE push.
Attack Damage - B.F. Sword normalization
Items Affected: BF Sword, Infinity Edge, Bloodthirster, Mercurial Scimitar
We're going to be normalizing everything that builds out of B.F. Sword to have 80 Attack Damage with minimal price increases to compensate - as well as shifting B.F. Sword to have 50 Attack Damage at the 1600 Gold price point, instead of 45 Attack Damage at the 1550 Gold price point.
On the whole, we like what this does to the overall decision making when purchasing a B.F. Sword - you know it will eventually morph into an 80 Attack Damage item - the only question being what sorts of side utility you want out of the whole deal.
There's a slight caveat here in that this puts an unfortunate damper on Bloodthirster - whose presence is too dominant and skews the power between Ratio driven carries and more traditional basic attack oriented carries.
Essentially, BT goes down in power - everything else goes up in power - including the midgame where you build up to BT.
Attack Speed Itemization - Dagger Retuning
Items Affected: Dagger, Berzerker's Greaves, Zeal
Attack Speed isn't a particularly attractive statistic to overcommit to at the moment given the natural Attack Speed growth of carries. We're making some slight buffs to Dagger to help mitigate some of the mid-game power issues that carries are facing at the moment where Attack Speed only feels good at the final completed item rather than during the build-up, where it matters.
Basically, you usually do get enough Attack Speed by the end of the game with your build. It's just that the entire way to the end item, you don't have nearly enough. You can expect these items to have slightly more attack speed with a minimal price increase.
For example: Berzerker's Greaves giving 5% more Attack Speed and costing 50 more Gold.
Lifesteal
Going to start with a quick item preview as a framing piece:
Doran's Blade
80 Health --> 70 Health
8 Attack Damage --> 7 Attack Damage
3/5 Life on Hit --> 3% Life Steal
For a long time, we were trying to phase out early life steal as a statistic and replacing it with other mechanisms such as life on hit. However, with the rise of non-sustain supports - this avenue no longer makes sense. With non-sustain based supports being the norm rather an exception - Life Steal needs to be easily accessible from a variety of sources in order for the ADC to not be locked into a single early build path - the one that includes Life Steal.
With this in mind, it makes more sense for Life Steal to be more expensive overall but easier to 'stack' from a wider variety of sources rather than have Life Steal be a single specific path.
Hence, we're going to lower the life steal amounts of all items - but introduce it back into Doran's Blade in order for carries to have a wider range of possible % Life Steal values - this allows carries to basically build the 'right' amount of life steal for their carry type, their support and the power of their lane opponents - rather than having one single overpowered choice that tries to cover every situation in which you might need sustain.
On the whole, you can expect there to be less life steal on each of the life steal items but more available % life steal options. What we expect to see is a slightly wider range of potential first order buys - especially since this version of Doran's Blade has more mid game potential.
Doran's Blade + Doran's Blade + Doran's Blade + Infinity Edge
Doran's blade + Blood Thirster
Doran's Blade + Blade of the Ruined King
Doran's Blade + Doran's Blade + Vamp Scepter --> ?
Bloodthirster
70 Attack Damage --> 80 Attack Damage
12% Life Steal --> 15% Life Steal
Unique Stacking Passive --> Removed
New Passive --> Your life steal effects can overheal you, granting you a shield equal to the excess up to X (based on character level). This shield decays if you haven't dealt or taken damage in 15 seconds
Bloodthirster becomes a problem when its too commonplace as it creates a situation where it basically comes down to who acquires it first. This is both due to the power and build path of the item as well as the stacking mechanic on it. Additionally, it favors Attack Damage ratio-driven carries who traditionally have weaker end-games to begin with. We're retuning Bloodthirster to be a more consistent choice and to give other damage options a more favorable comparison point.
We know that this will leave certain ranged characters that rely on Bloodthirster Stacking in a bit of a bind at the moment - Certain heavy AD Varus and Miss Fortune builds will be in a bit of a pinch without a stackable Attack Damage source. However, given how Bloodthirster both supports these characters and suppresses them by being more favorable to other characters - it's not really contributing to a healthier ecosystem.
Melee will generally come out favorably as they have a very offensive life steal item (Hydra) and a more defensive one (Bloodthirster).
Mikael's Crucible
Lastly, I want to talk about Crucible - this item is too commonplace and negates a lot of decision making in the end game. Crucible does odd things where it devalues long cooldown initiation patterns in exchange for repeated pick patterns.
This heavily suppresses utility centric carries like Ashe or Varus who rely on these patterns to be strategically interesting.
We do like that Crucible is an option in the game but it is currently too broad of a pick and appearing too frequently on a much wider array of supports than intended. Mikael's is just as good as a buy on offensive tanky supports as defensive ones - which skews the balance of power even farther away from initiation based carries as their unique niche both gets countered and replaced by the same character.
We're going to both raise the cost of this item and adjust the statline to favor more Mana intensive supports to shifts Mikael into favoring more mage-centric supports rather than Tank supports. We'll be adding another support item in Mikael's price point in order to grant a wider breadth of items - the details of which will be on the PBE post on Friday."
He continued, replying to questions concerning the attack speed changes and the price increase on BF sword:
"Attack Speed
We're mostly only targetting the mid-game build up of these items with Attack Speed. Currently, any Attack Speed build tends to build an excess of it - rather than not have enough. What we specifically wanted to do is make the traditional ADC Attack Speed items give more Attack Speed along the waybecause currently their midgames seem far more painful than they have to be.
The only real item that will see a net increase in power / gold will be Berzerker's Greaves - which has been more traditionally ADC focused - though it does see some fringe use in super aggressive fighter builds.
BF Sword cost increase
This has come up once or twice in playtesting but a 50 Gold difference is fairly minimal in terms of the pace of the overall game. It's effectively 2 CS - which can be overcome by skill.
Essentially, I don't expect it to be a problem - but if it turns out to be the case, then the important thing that we'll keep is that B.F. Sword goes to 50 Attack Damage."
He continued, sharing this thoughts on how these changes will play out in the end game:
"The ADC typically suffers from a lack of uptime on their damage in the end-game, rather than a lack of damage straight up.
What usually happens is that they either don't have the time to kite or the survivability to survive the initial burst - and thus whatever damage window they have is pretty meaningless and tiny.
The Live team ultimately decided that removing the MS slow from Randuin's was a better call (detailed in their forecast, which I should really duplicate here) - which will give uptime through evasion / kiting.
The thought behind this version of BT is that it can help to provide a defensive buffer such that carries feel safer and can get more attacks in dangerous situations. It's essentially a form of survivability that you can only really access when your basic attack damage is insane."
As for the lifesteal changes, Xypherous elaborated:
"As stated in the post - Vampiric Scepter and almost every life steal item will have a reduction in % Life Steal.
Right now, carries only have three possible stopping points for life steal: 4.5% (Quints), 14.5% (Quints + VS) and 16.5% to Y% (BT).
My goal is to nerf every source of lifesteal that stems out of the Vampiric Scepter path, including Vampiric Scepter but add a small component source of % lifesteal such that there is a wider range of lifesteal values that a carry can get or stop at which will then allow him to choose what level of sustain he wants / feels like he needs."
When asked how the changes will play out for fights like Yi or Fiora, Xypherous replied:
"Unsure - BT changes don't hit them as hard mostly because Hydra exists as a very compelling parallel. I think it'll give them an additional item to think about as before, Hydra outclassed BT in almost every way on them - but now BT has a defensive component to it that they might appreciate.
On the whole, I think it's kind of neutral to positive note for them. They'll benefit from DBlade and get a little bit of item flexible from BT - but not a whole lot else as they don't benefit from Attack Speed as much as other classes."
When asked what changes are coming for Blade of the Ruined King, he shared:
"(There are light number changes to it - but the numbers aren't finalized. The general gist is that the proc is getting stronger but the active nuke is getting weaker.)"
As for Hextech Gunblade, he noted:
"Not currently. This is mostly focused on LS/ADC at the moment.
Gunblade is not getting changes to it's lifesteal - mostly because it's not an ADC item."
Xypherous also noted the Infinity Edge and Mercurial Scimitar changes will be:
"It's just a base AD increase with minor cost adjustments. In general, the items gain more AD than they gained in cost."
As for Bloodthirster into Trinity Force builds will fair from these changes, Xypherous noted:
"The common BT --> Tri-force build will definitely be weaker - as that's kind of the goal here. Ratio driven carries have pushed more traditional basic attack driven carries out of the playing field.
My goal is to ensure that the item system in general doesn't favor one subclass of carry over another - and that we try to add power onto ADC midgames such that they feel relevant earlier. Granted, these changes aren't huge by any means, some small amount of AD / AS and a better mid-game focused DBlade but we are doing things slowly for now as we're doing lots of things simultaneously."
When asked about the upcoming PBE post with more details, he noted:
"The Public Beta environment is a special forum that is meant to contain all the changes for the latest patch. I'm not sure of what the signup status of the PBE is but if you are a PBE tester - you'll have access to that forum.
Whenever my team does item changes, we usually try to put the changelist on PBE for at least a couple of weeks to get community responses / feedback. Since the PBE build is usually data-mined - we like posting the full changelist to avoid inaccuracies as well as answer questions."[/spoiler]
